WOODBURY, Minn.-
It’s hard to peer out in the darkness through the ice crystals that the hard freeze has painted inside the window. They’re so exquisitely intricate that no decorator can hope to duplicate them in adhesive paper.
I rely on the sound of tires sliding over and crunching the powdery snow to tell me that guests are arriving, adroitly navigating ribbons of packed ice that reflect the twinkling lights festooned over trees and homes.
That’s the music of winter in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and the surrounding area, including the suburb of Woodbury, where my family lives. Here, frigid cold and crystalline snow are behind both the storybook-perfect wonderland and the pride that hardy Minnesotans revel in, no matter how low that irrelevant thermometer plunges.
I never heard that sound anywhere other than in the northern Plains. It’s not the slushing over dirty, melting white stuff in metropolises, nor the grinding of snow chains eating through mountain villages.
This is the real thing–the result of snow so hard-frozen that it’s plowed over, not through, and that it stays bleached white despite the ravages of traffic in a metro area with a population of 3 million.
In other parts of the country, winter dreamers must make do smog-sogged snow on the curb or cotton balls on palm trees. But here, from the patches of snow on the Mississippi River, to the skaters on the Lake of the Isles, to the slide-and-crunch noise of cars on the frozen roadways, winter is a fairy tale come true.
